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Madoff Had Affair With Hadassah CFO

She testified against him

by
Ari M. Brostoff
August 13, 2009
(Hiroko Masuike/Getty Images)
(Hiroko Masuike/Getty Images)

Former Hadassah CFO Sheryl Weinstein was one of nine Bernie Madoff victims to give withering testimony at the conman’s June sentencing. “He walks, dresses like us—but underneath he is a beast,” she said then. “Keep him in a cage behind bars.” It all takes on a different cast, doesn’t it, now that she’s revealed she had had an affair with the man who defrauded her? Weinstein has written a soon-to-be-released memoir called Madoff’s Other Secret: Love, Money, Bernie, and Me; Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble are selling advance copies without revealing the identity of the author, but a spokesman for St. Martin’s Press confirmed that it’s Weinstein, Bloomberg News reports.

Weinstein met Madoff 21 years ago when she hired him to manage a $7 million donation to Hadassah, according to Bloomberg. The Jewish women’s organization later invested another $33 million with him, and Weinstein invested with him personally. At the sentencing, she said that she and her husband of 37 years have had to sell their home after losing “everything” to Madoff’s scam. “Our son Eric worked for him one summer in college. A few months before this, [Eric] called to thank him,” she said in her testimony. “My family and I are not anonymous people to him.” Apparently not.

Ari M. Brostoff is Culture Editor at Jewish Currents.